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Learning Kitchen: Gluten-Free Banana Bread

I know, I know. I can’t stop baking. All of my most recent posts are about me in the kitchen, but I finally have a good reason: gluten-free banana bread!

It’s not that I’m actually gluten-free, but I’m surrounded by people who are, and I love learning new ways to make healthier treats for everyone.

I found a recipe on gimmedelicious.com that looked promising. Moist banana bread made with gluten-free flour but without the need for added xantham gum? Sold.

It actually turned out to be almost identical to every regular flour banana bread I’ve made, with the addition of milk and an extra banana. So easy. So quick. So tasty.

Here’s what it looked like:

Cream together butter and sugar. Add milk – shot glass not required.Add bananas, vanilla, and dry ingredients. The honey was my own addition.

I tasted the mixture of butter, sugar, eggs, bananas, vanilla, and dry ingredients (yes, I am aware raw eggs are scary). But it just wasn’t sweet enough, as though maybe my bananas were more on the fruity bitter side rather than the fruity sweet side, if that makes any sense.

It might also be because I used raw cane sugar instead of white sugar, but that’s because I’m trying to avoid lots of extra processing in my homemade stuff.

So I added honey, stirred it up, and poured half into a small 8×4 loaf pan that I’d greased with olive oil. Then I stirred chocolate chips into the other half of the batter and loaded another pan up, too.

Garnishing the chocolate chip banana bread with, er, chocolate chips. So I can tell them apart – and because chocolate.

They baked at the recommended 350F (a little more at some point until I checked my oven thermometer and saw the temp had raised to 375F) for the 50 minutes that the recipe said I’d need, and voila!

The house smelled like banana heaven. It took all my self-control not to dig in immediately!

When I brought these two loaves to work this morning, they disappeared in about 35 minutes. I found that toasting the chocolate-free slices made them extra moist (something about steam), but my sugar-fiend coworkers demolished both loaves without any need for that. Piggies.

That tight, even crumb. The glistening chocolate chips. The extra oomph of honey. Yes, yes this was worth it.

The only caveat here is that, despite the yummy flavor and easy method, this is still gluten-free banana bread. Because I used the Enjoy Life Ancient Grains All Purpose Flour Mix (that is celiac-certified and gluten-free), there was a little bit of the powdery aftertaste that is inherent in flours made from tapioca and rice. As long as you’re expecting that this bread will be different in that way from banana bread made with wheat flour, this is sure to be your go-to recipe for gluten-free banana bread!